Today on the Winning with Shopify podcast.
Rebel Cheese is a non dairy plant based vegan cheese
company. I know from experience if I
start deleting apps, SEO starts going up.
Where would a brand like us fit and how do we know that those
numbers, those metrics actually are relevant to us?
You've just made what is one of the most complicated parts of
e-commerce and just running a retail related business.
You've made it sound so simple. It's the process of continuously
learning and improving and knowing that whatever is working
today may not work tomorrow. I think so many brands like,
well, we kind of, we kind of do this, we kind of do that.
It doesn't really work like that.
I've got to be ready for all the emails that come in from all of
the dumb things you didn't think about.
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all of you. So thank you so much for
supporting the show. I'm honoured to have an amazing
brand and an amazing guest on the show today.
He's done a huge amount of work ahead of today, coming up with
some amazing questions, some great answers.
His name is Paul, he's the CTO of Rebel Cheese.
Paul, welcome to the show. How are you?
I'm amazing, Nick, great, wonderful to be here.
This is such a huge honour. You're like my Trinity of E.
Commerce, you don't have to say that.
What else Sir? And you're like, you're my
weekly go to guys. So thank you so much.
Oh, amazing. I really appreciate that and
it's so good to have you on and I'm glad we've been helpful on
the journey. My my wife would tell me my head
gets too big when people say this, so hopefully she doesn't
listen to this bit. But so good to have you on.
Paul, I'm so excited to stay. You've got an amazing
background. The business is awesome.
Some of the questions that I've got on my list or topics to talk
about with you, I'm really excited about and deliberately
don't know too much about so I can hear fresh on the show.
But I mentioned your background. Paul, tell us what your
background is and how you got involved in being the CTO of
Rebel Cheese in the first place. Oh sure.
So total, I've spent about 27 years in tech.
I started right out of college as a software developer for 12
years at IBM here in Austin, TX. And after that for about 5 years
I was a product manager at the company is currently called NXP
Semiconductor Company, but it used to be called Freescale
Semiconductor. Then after that I spent about 6
1/2 years as a senior product manager at Amazon and Amazon as
everyone knows huge company. The organization that I was
specifically in was the Amazon.com part or what we call
retail and that gave me a lot of experience in the large
enterprise version of e-commerce.
And so when I met Kirsten and Fred, the Co founders of Rebel
Cheese about six years ago, they had just started Rebel Cheese
and kind of maintained friends with them for those few years.
And when we had the opportunity in 2023 to be on Shark Tank, we
I was able to join as someone just it was meant to be the
person to fix their e-commerce site which was not on Shopify at
the time. So my first job within a week
was to migrate the old stack onto Shopify and get us ready
for our Shark Tank launch. And sorry to interrupt, but what
was it on before Shopify? What's the previous platform?
Oh, so it was on square. I don't want to discourage the
squares are perfectly fine. It does what it does.
But where we needed to go for all of the traffic and
everything that was about to happen, Shopify was just a much
better stack. And I had looked at other
platforms like WooCommerce and Magento, but Shopify, just as
your listeners viewers know, just the fact that you can tune
and tweak everything yourself and make your own mistakes is
just the power of Shopify. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And see you've been involved in Rebel Cheese for a few years now
and CTO like that's not the normal job title we would have
on the show. Like Chief, I'm guessing it's
chief technical officer. What what is, what is your role
involved then like how, how are you involved in the in the
business? Like, what sort of things do you
look after? So I would say in a short
sentence, my main role is job is being like the father guardian
of the software stack. So initially it was our D2 CE
commerce stack Shopify. And over the months after Shark
Tank, as we've built out our direct wholesale program, I set
up a separate Shopify store for wholesale and our distribution
channel that has been building up.
The software that distribution is using is Google Sheets, so
not necessarily. So I have a project in place to
also migrate that over to Shopify as well.
And our 2 brick and mortar locations use Toast.
So I have to integrate all the different software, whether it's
Shopify or Ship Station, which we use for fulfillment and
shipping management, our new inventory management system,
they are, we are just like days hopefully away from turning on
Cortana. So keeping track of all the
integrations, making sure that everything is talking to each
other as well as some side pieces of software like Polar
Analytics, which we use to pull all those metrics together to
get one big dashboard so we can kind of hopefully keep a pulse
and everything. Yeah.
You've just made what is one of the most complicated parts of
e-commerce and, and just running a retail related business.
You've made it sound so simple. So you're clearly good at what
you're doing. I, I, I find so many hours that
we spend even just as an agency here fixing analytics, getting
that to talk to Shopify. We're doing a Shopify to eBay
and a Shopify to Amazon integration for a client at the
moment. I say integration.
We're just setting them up and it's so good.
Just clicking like new app, set that up, set up some information
that eBay profiles created that product listings are going out,
which means means we can focus our time on the imagery, the
text, the titles, the marketing, how do we position those prices
and that kind of thing. So Shopify is amazing that I
always find it up there. And I was saying this before we
hit record as well. Like I find it amazing when
people move to Shopify, they think, great, all my technical
woes are over. So one of my questions, which I
think you've kind of answered already, was really going to be
why would a Shopify brand need a CTO?
Like, you know, you've got all these things, but I think you've
explained really well, actually, there's two Shopify stores.
There's another store that is currently running through a
Google Sheet for wholesale. There's obviously Toast running
in the stores themselves and that kind of thing.
So there's a lot going on. And for most brands in using
Shopify, what, what would your advice be about when they move
to Shopify in terms of setting that expectation about it?
Because it's not a all your technical woes are fixed.
There are some we're going to talk about a few of these we go
through. There are some pitfalls and
things that can really affect actually commercial trades if
you get them wrong. What would your advice be to
someone who's looking to move to Shopify or you've just moved
there and thought, great text finished.
I can just do marketing for the rest of my life.
So it's a big question, I would say in general.
I mean, this seems pretty obvious for all small business
owners, whether you're on Shopify or not.
But just the critical piece of a small business owner is keeping
your costs under control and that Shopify does provide a
great way for you to see, OK, here's my AOV, my conversion
ratio sessions turning into orders, which first time versus
returning customers. So all those basic metrics you
get access to and then where you have to know for your small
business, whether you're the founder or in a supporting role
like myself, is, are those numbers good?
Because if you don't know, like if you don't have a, a
comparative like counterpoint to know like, OK, we're for US food
CPG in the US. And our, just to give a little
bit background, our average order value for a, a typical
customer is going to be about $110 and that's about 5 items in
a cart. And they come back about every
4045 days. So $110 might seem high for food
doing e-commerce that also happens to be perishable food.
But, and so I have to spend a lot of time listening to
podcasts like yourself and others and reading articles
about food CPG, but also e-commerce in general to find
out like where would a brand like us fit?
And how do we know that those numbers, those metrics actually
are relevant to us just because they might be really good for
somebody else. And then the cost to go with
that, Because one of the good and the bad things about Shopify
is that you have all these apps. And that's also the bad thing is
you have all these on like, OK, if I start having 20 or 30 apps
and do all these little different things, they might be
saving me time, but end up costing me a lot of money that I
may not see till 3060 days later.
And you might realize later that, oh, there's actually a
feature built into Shopify that I didn't know about that I could
have actually adjusted or tuned to do one of those things.
So for me, it's the process of continuously learning and
improving and knowing that whatever is working today may
not work tomorrow or vice versa. Whatever is not working today
may work tomorrow for different reasons, new customers,
different segments like moving into Canada or Mexico or the UK,
that that's where you just have to keep continuously,
continuously improving and changing and adapting and that
takes a lot of time. Yeah, yeah.
We're going to come back to apps in a second because you've hit
about 5 of my, like, nerve points as an SEO guy of our
apps. So we're going to come back to
apps in a second. One thing we've, I completely
forgot to ask you, Paul. And this will show how like
click clean cut the, the, the podcast actually is.
I didn't actually ask you what rebel cheese do.
I mean, I know because I, I've known of you guys for a while.
Give us a quick overview to it because you mentioned about
perishable products, food, SMS, FMCG, which suddenly reminded me
like we're still just, it's not just, you don't actually sell
dairy cheese at all, do you? It's, it's vegan and, and
different. So tell us quickly just the
product range as well so people can picture what you guys do.
Yes, that's correct. So Rebel Cheese is a non dairy
plant based vegan cheese company.
In a nutshell, our elevator pitch is we make handcrafted
artisanal, non dairy plant based cheeses for people who want to
see good aged fermented cheeses like Brie, smoked cheddar,
parmesan, mozzarella that you'd be happy to present on a
charcuterie board. So we don't do shreds, we don't
do slices in a bag. We want you if you're gonna have
a picnic or have a centerpiece where you're gonna have a party
and people stop and look and like, Oh my God, what is that?
That can't be like dairy truffle.
Bree, what is this smoked cheddar, this pimento cheese.
So that's where we we're elevating what you would
normally see as an everyday product into something that's
more artisanal, European. And So what we do, and a lot of
people ask like vegan cheese, isn't that like just a lot of
preservatives and fillers? So that's one of the things that
makes us unique is we are taking the exact same processes and
procedures and techniques that the dairy industry uses, just
instead of cow, sheep, goat milk, we're using nut based
milk. So that's the medium.
We start with cashew milk or almond milk.
And then from there, the rest of it is aging and fermenting the
cheeses to get a two week old truffle Brie or a smoked cheddar
or a pimento cheese or pepper Jack or a Gouda or mozzarella or
any of these types of elevated cheeses.
Yeah, yeah. And a lot of people around me
are vegan. And I, I have, I, I call myself
a flexitarian. I'm not vegan, but I eat a lot
of vegan meals and stuff. So I've tried quite a lot of
vegan cheeses and I think some of them have just not got it
right. Like you, you eat a cheese and
it tastes more like a soybean and you think it's not quite
right. It's not quite where it needs to
be, but I, I, if anyone's sitting there thinking into
themselves as well, I'm struggling to get my brand
positioning and stuff right. Paul, you've just described in
like, I think that even just the first kind of two or three
sentences, your elevator pitch absolutely nailed what you guys
are about. There was 3 or 4 different whys
in there about the handmade, the artisan that we want to put it
on a cheese board. So people take inspiration from
actually what you've just said, Paul, because it was such a
beautiful way of explaining it and it just rolls off the tongue
because you guys have cemented that positioning.
I think so many brands like, well, we kind of, we kind of do
this, we kind of do that. It doesn't, it doesn't really
work like that to, to get it nailed.
So then when you come to like a Google ads or your homepage to
the website, trying to nail that can be really, really difficult.
But I promised we're going to come back to apps.
So apps, I know from experience, if I start deleting apps and
depending on which ones I delete, SEO starts going up
because and our rankings go up and traffic increases because of
the page, page speed and page load and that sort of thing.
Give us an overview then to how you guys, because you mentioned
kind of that's one of the things you would advise people on the
shop, how rebel cheese in your role.
Have you actually attacked some of the page speed problems, some
of the functionality problems you mentioned, obviously listen
to podcasts, but what have been some of the outputs that you
guys have been like? Have you developed your own code
for things? Are you using an all more all in
What's your approach? So great question.
So one of the well, couple of apps that I use are Microsoft's
clarity for heatmap and tracking and also seeing some of the page
lags, but also Shopify's own web page performance on the
analytics on the theme editor and Lighthouse are great tools
that help you just know, are we accidentally inadvertently
putting too much JavaScript heavy big images?
Now, Shopify is good about making sure that it's helping
you not have 50 Meg PNGS jpegs just by the nature that it
prevents you from loading them into the store to begin with.
But still, you still want to make sure that you don't have a
death by 1000 paper cuts because if you get a little lazy with
some Jpegs and PNGS after you have a few 100, then overall,
you know, you kind of you've lost the plot as far as the page
speed and time. And it also helps you What I
like to do with my Shopify specialist who helps be my
counterbalance is about every so often 30 days, we do an analysis
to read, to reassess like OK, with AB testing of the landing
page, product pages, even the images.
Is this still the best thing that's working?
So we'll do that through a careful balance of the
quantitative data, like I just said, using some of the tools
either built within Shopify or Lighthouse or heat clarity for
heat map testing, AB testing, but then also the qualitative.
So we do, I have a post purchase.
I use user loop for my post purchase survey.
So that's what I found is the hottest time to get someone.
They've already spent 110 to 120 thirty dollars.
Ask them a question, two or three questions right away.
I give them a 10% discount if they answer all the questions
and I have like a 37% response rate after about a year of doing
it, I like have 100 and 1110 thousand responses.
So a huge amount of qualitative responses to find out one of the
reasons it's good to do that, not just for different
demographics, but when it was a big eye opener.
Before Shark Tank, of course our world was a lot smaller and
therefore our customers were vegan or vegetarian.
After Shark Tank, when I launched that post purchase
survey and I asked what's your lifestyle?
How would you describe yourself? Vegan, vegetarian, lactose,
dairy intolerant or sensitive. Our world shifted.
So we have a steady 35% of our customers are about or would
describe themselves as vegan or vegetarian. 55% of our customers
are dairy, lactose intolerant or sensitive.
So that's to what you were saying earlier, A huge eye
opener from a marketing, whether it's paid or organic, we need to
start looking at the much bigger slice of the pie because in the
US, about 3% of the pop of the US population identifies as
vegan versus about 55 to 60% of the US population has some sort
of dairy sensitivity, whether it's full blown lactose
intolerance or makes their, you know, digestive system not
happy. So why would we go after a small
little slice versus a large, large swath?
So that's been very eye opening as far testing not just
messaging apps and performance, but knowing where we want to
shift our messages along the way.
We've worked with quite a few brands that are like like we've
worked with the loose leaf tea brands that were really against
plastic in tea bags and they were had this war on plastic and
tea bags. And when you say to someone, you
do realise like 10 to 20% of what you drink in a tea bag,
Maybe we drink more tea in the UK, but in the tea bag 20, you
know, 10 to 20% of it is plastic that you're drinking.
People kind of go, wow, that's awful.
And then they make another cup of tea using a tea bag rather
than a loose leaf. They don't make a lifestyle
change. But then when we pivoted the
marketing to say, actually, it's delicious, like these are all
after effects. Like it's, it's like I, I guess
it's with some people like the brand of tobacco you might smoke
or the alcohol you might drink or the chocolate you might
choose, you're actually going down probably hates it, but the
selfish route of going. I just prefer it.
It's better. So the dairy route might be I
feel more comfortable. So, you know, I've got some
level of dairy intolerance. This cheese tastes amazing and
it's dairy free. So that's a really, really good
alternative to me. And, but actually, what then
what you even project verbally to people is, Oh, and it's vegan
because you like telling people you're actually eating a vegan
cheese, even though not vegan. But it's, it's pivoting the
marketing around that. And I think certainly for brands
more in their infancy, it's, it's kind of going back to your
one liner on what we do as a brand.
It's so difficult to kind of work that out until you've got
enough traction. It's, I call it the chicken and
egg. You've got to get enough sales,
get enough data to be able to analyse, to be able to get some
qualitative reports done or quantitative data together to
understand what really, really works.
We've spoken about apps then. So bigger than just the apps in
in Shopify, your bigger, wider tech stack.
Are there any specific decisions you made early on that you've
actually gone that was a terrible idea or actually it's
it's been a game changer for us and we should have done it
sooner or we didn't understand how powerful it was when we
first integrated that tech or, or used a new piece of software.
Well, every day I make tons of mistakes.
Don't we all? I always hope I learn from them,
but I think again, it was lack of time and just having wearing
too many hats. I wish that I had more time
earlier after we launched our Shark Tank episode to be able to
get a really good understanding of the shipping costs for which
would include things like Because We are plant based
cheeses were perishable. So that means our goal is to try
to get the product to you once we ship.
So the fulfillment may take 3 or 4 days for the kitchen to make
the products etcetera. But once we say your product is
shipped 2 days or less. So that means we have to have
insulation in the boxes that we make sure are compostable or
recyclable ice packs that are going to be enough ice packs
that will keep the product at 40° Fahrenheit or less for that
one to two day travel. And also not 'cause the box to
waste so much that we pay a crazy amount of shipping cost
from FedEx or UPS. So we my Co founder Fred and I
are constantly analyzing and re analyzing who is the best
cardboard box vendor, who is the best insulation vendor, who is
the best ice pack vendor as well as other things like the tape
that goes on there because everybody wants to sell you
stuff. But if one of our sub goals as
rebel cheese is to also be sustainable and you try to have,
you know, the the least impact on the planet as we can as far
as these materials, that already eliminates a lot of those.
And once we make that signed that contract for truckloads of
boxes and ice, one of the things I didn't mention is we own our
own vertical, our entire vertical.
So we have our own production kitchen, our own warehouse, our
own fulfillment center. So we own everything, which
allows us to own everything but also make our own mistakes that
can be very costly. So place that order for the.
Sorry to interrupt, but just to say it's really interesting just
on that point that you mentioned about making our own mistakes.
Because I think a lot of brands I've talked to, whether they've
made the jump or they're planning to make the jump to do
all their own fulfilment of warehousing, they think it's
going to be better. But every change, every move, it
must come with its own challenges.
So just, I just wanted to flag, I really appreciate you sharing
that because it's quite a humble thing to hear actually that it
sounds amazing. But actually it does come with
its own challenges of now we don't have a fulfilment company
doing what they do best. We're trying to do that bit
ourselves, which means we're going to make we're going to
make mistakes along the way. That can be.
That's both pro and con because we signed the contract and then
two weeks later 2 semi trucks, 18 Wheelers of insulation come
or cardboard come and we're like, OK, we're committed to
this now versus, you know, we've had some of our partners and
other CPG brands that have commands or other VPLS that do
that. They sign the contract.
It's the wrong box, the wrong packaging.
They're also committed because that's that's so it's the same
just who is going to own the mistake and that financial
burden. But it does allow us to do that
with like to your question, I wish I had been able to have
more time to learn that so that we could carefully follow the
rules of what FedEx and UPS were wanting us and be able to set up
the software to monitor on a very regular basis.
We've been able to correct that now by having AI and some tools
that one of our other Co founders, Kirsten made that are
trying to make sure to carefully monitor the shipping costs so
that if we're using FedEx or UPS, they have different rules
versus weight versus dimensions so that we're within that so
that we don't end up with a surprise bill, you know, at the
end of the week or 30 days later.
Yeah. And I guess at your level as
well, if you make, I mean, you call it a mistake, but even if
it's just over, if it's underestimated by 5%, you times
that 5% cost underestimation by a few thousand orders.
And suddenly the finance director is knocking on your
door going, Paul, we need to talk.
It's like, what have I done now? It's always that, that kind of
conversation which we need to avoid.
And I think it's so easy though, isn't it?
With Shopify, which is also definitely a blessing, but can
also be a bit of a curse to say that it's so easy just to like
put the FedEx app into Shopify. And if an order comes in and
FedEx goes, great, drop it off to us, which, you know, we'll
get that thing out to the customer.
And what you don't see is there's no one approving all
those individual costs. Say, I've noticed with so many
clients over the years. And we, although we're in front
end customer acquisition, we hear about these things from
clients where they've missed kind of like 1 use case where
it's like this one product's not expensive enough, but it's
heavy, so it doesn't justify the shipping cost.
And it's, it's normally when we turn around and say, Hey, we've
got a new bestseller product ROI on Google's going through the
roof and they're like, stop selling.
They're made of concrete. Like it's so heavy and we don't
make it. It's fine if they order the
products that goes on the fit the concrete, but don't just
sell the concrete. And we're like, oh, we've become
a bit of a niche. And we actually had that with
them concrete bases to Paracel umbrellas for people's gardens
at one point. It's like if they buy an
umbrella, fine. If they don't buy an umbrella,
it costs us more to ship than the product costs.
And it was like, OK, we just put the price up and they did and we
eventually found the right kind of financials in a different
delivery company. But as I say, it's those little
use cases and I'm sure you guys have had this in the over the
years. Those little use cases can
really come back to sting you if you get them wrong, especially
on your level because 1 little mistake becomes 1000 when 1000
orders have gone through. Right.
And related to that is also having worked at a company like
Amazon, everyone expects free shipping, one day, one hour
delivery. You know, it's like, OK, we
can't do that. If you think about it, it's at.
Your front door? Yeah, it's not How?
Like small business offer, you can't just get free.
So we're having to carefully always discuss and re discuss,
analyze what is the correct threshold?
Is it a $20 flat fee? But knowing that we still are
going to eat a certain amount because if the cost is $24.00 to
ship a product, we're eating that $4.00.
Did we then send that message on the website to customers like,
hey, you might think $20 is expensive, but it's actually
costing us $24.00 or we have to think about that.
The customer doesn't care about that.
They're probably thinking that's your problem, not mine.
So I want this when I want it. So those are all things that are
interesting and always a constant battle to discuss.
And it's hard, isn't it? Because I think certainly from
the kind of financials point of view, you're looking at a
spreadsheet and saying, oh, it's too expensive or here's how
we're going to make it work on the financials with product
prices, delivery costs, etcetera, etcetera.
But then there's always some creative genius that comes in
the room at some point and goes, hey, have you tried this
delivery company? And it's like, well, that just
changes everything. So I, I always say you need to
kind of balance, make sure there's the space for the
creativity to find solutions to these creative solutions to
these problems. And the creative solution we've
seen with one client in particular was actually to say,
we're going to put the whole delivery cost on the customer.
We know our competitors don't do that.
It gives us a competitive like disadvantage.
But the, the reason that they did that, although the way they
counted that was creative creatively to say, do you know
what? You don't want the delivery cost
to be cheap. As you say, you need this
product to be refrigerated on its transit and it needs to
arrive refrigerated, which means we're not going to leave it on
your doorstep in the middle of summer while you're not there.
And it will just, everything will just apart and it'll be a
disaster. And, and, and also sort of the
laws are in the US, but you're liable, you know, like we're
still liable. It's all these kind of things, I
think actually explaining stuff like that or having like a
booked delivery slot. If it's a large furniture item,
like we've got one client that they offer free delivery on
their sofas, They offer premium delivery where you know, it's
going to be a morning or an afternoon and then they offer
like a one hour slot delivery. And we've actually found by
changing the design of it, the one hour slot delivery has
become the most popular, even though it costs another £100.
But the sofa itself would cost over 1000.
So you're adding 1015 percent, 1010% or less.
Sorry to the cost, but you know, you've got that.
Zach, how much do you then have to work or get involved yourself
in marketing? Because you're the one that's
come up with the the integration or the spreadsheet that says we
can, we can do this effectively and we can do this efficiently
from a cost analysis point of view.
Oh, so that's a great question because we're a small company.
It's really only about 15 or less of us that I would consider
like the corporate team, which is kind of weird saying that
coming from Amazon, the core of us that do all the work like
that are not that probably came out the wrong way.
But the folks that are in the production kitchen or working at
the restaurants or in the fulfillment center are doing
their respective roles. But the rest of us that are the
two Co founders are marketing lead customer service, those we
all get together to make those decisions.
Because to your question, I'm seeing it from the tech stack.
Our marketing person is seeing it from the messaging to the
customer because nervously it has to think about like, I got
to be ready for all the response, the emails that come
in from all of the dumb things you didn't think about.
I don't know founder who handles the APR he's looking at like OK,
well that's going to cost us this amount and by our other Co.
So we all have our different lens and how we that's really
cool, really helps so that we're trying to look around the
corners as much as possible and I.
I find this so much and we talk about, there's a couple of other
questions I want to. So it's very inside.
But just just to add this, I, I find that from a marketing
content point of view, people like the CTO, the customer
service team are vital. And I'd say even more in the B
to B kind of lead generation world than e-commerce like we're
talking about today. But in B to B, we find that we
often say like, get us your best salesperson and show us just in
a minute per pitch. Just whip us through the slide
deck and the, and just a quick analysis of the conversation you
had for your best 3 corporate companies or deals you signed
recently. And half the stuff they talk
about, not on the website, not in the ads nobody knew about.
And it's like, well, that's the reason people bought from you.
Let's get them to the forefront because that, that's the real
thing that made people tick. Because you're the guy who's
been, you know, the woman who's been standing in front of people
and, and shaking the hand at the end of that conversation.
It's exactly the same in e-commerce for customer service.
You made me laugh. Just say you say the things we
did that are causing problems. I've had a few emails from
customer service teams saying like, you're our marketing
agency. Why have you got this on the
ads? And we're like, well, it's on
the website. Why is it on the website?
It's only this investigation begins of like and it.
Yeah. And there's a whole world of
outcomes that come from that. But I love, I love the way you
describe. Actually.
We sit down and talk about things, guys, we're going to
change this. What does that mean for you?
For you, for you? And almost a space where each
person, each team, each department can bring ideas and
say at customer service, we get a lot of questions about this.
Could we put something on the website to stop that?
That becomes a marketing campaign.
You think of a bit the tech actually that could solve that
problem for customers. It might be that they're asking
about delivery times and we should put something on the
website about it. You can change the SMS messages
that go out and this whole conveyor belt of things can come
along to fix that use case. And ultimately it means you get
more attention from your customers, you get more sales.
But some good things must come out of that when you're then
looking forward with these ideas.
So the question I really want to ask you is looking forward what,
what are some of the things in the e-commerce world and also
within Rebel GS that you, you specifically, as well as the
company are really excited about looking forward in?
What if you read the news in the UK or the USA right now, it's
all looking a bit bleak. Like, tell us some of the stuff
you're excited about at the moment.
Looking forwards. So it's a looking forward, I
mean kind of the looking forward, but right in front of
us right now is tariffs, tariffs to us or what's this world going
to be? But I think it's going to give
us a good exercise, small businesses, large businesses to
have a Plan B and a plan C. So if your supply chain has
traditionally been like we get this set of ingredients from
this country in Southeast Asia and then these from Latin
America, Do you have a backup plan?
And that's easier said than done because for small businesses,
no, we don't because it's money like we.
So that's going to give us all a chance to sit down and think we
need to have a plan B&C. So when any kind of shifts
happen in the world, we're ready for that as well.
And not just from the supply chain, but what's the messaging?
Because if you rely on your products being organic or like
you were saying earlier about the tea company with the
plastic, you might need to also pivot when your product
ingredients or whatever changes that might change some of the
messaging to customers. And as you have to get ahead of
that. Another one that's, I mean it's
kind of tiresome right now for folks is AI.
We are looking at AI all over the place.
I mean me specifically because I'm the tech person in the team.
You must know. About AI, surely that's there.
That's probably what people say to you quite a lot, what I've
been doing. With Polar Analytics, which is a
fantastic tool to gather all the metrics is I've also been I hope
no one, none of the polar people are on her condition, but you're
safe, don't worry. I think we're both considering.
What they do so I can see because again they need to make
money, but it's a very expensive analytics, it's a software So
now with apps, no code apps like Replit and I was able to build
essentially my version of a Control Center.
I need a better name for it. Trying to think of like what is
a TARDIS or, you know, Jarvis or something, but I built a Control
Center that will essentially pull in all of the metrics
reports that I need from Shopify, Shipstation, gorgeous
rebuy, judge me for reviews so that we can see all in one
place, a Clavio, all of those metrics, those reports and how
they interact with each other. And I would say a year ago
having a no code app like something like Replit would have
just been clunky and impossible to use.
But now within about 5 weeks, I was able to build something
that's actually very usable and is I can see, you know, month to
month is going to get even easier and better to use.
So that's something I think it doesn't matter how big or small
your company is and how if you're in food, clothing, tea,
whatever it is, AI is going to be a part of our lives.
Just like smartphones, the Internet, cloud services, you
know, electricity. It's going to be something that
no, like, why wouldn't this have AI?
We're not even going to be talking about it as a thing in
the next few months to a year. It's just going to be part of
every piece of software that is just going to help you.
And that's just something we have to really get used to using
and feel comfortable with it or hire somebody that is capable
with it from day one. Yeah, absolutely.
And just to say on AI, if this is going to be a selfless, a
selfish plug and I'm doing a selflessly growth hub guys is
our community. It's completely free.
If you want to join anybody, go and check out the growth hub.
And it might have just happened, but we're probably going to do a
few on them. And we did an e-mail one about
e-mail content just before I recorded this episode with Paul
where I'm sitting right now. We would have done one on AI, I
think, before this episode's gone out, but we're going to do
a few more. They're completely free round
tables. They're on Google meets you just
come along. I'm the only non brand there.
And as soon as the brands are talking, I just kind of go quiet
or I instigate conversation if, if needs be.
But it's the opportunity to talk about AI and something we did on
the e-mail one as we started discussing some of the AI tools
people are using and how they're using them.
And Tara, you deserve a shout out.
Tara, you've been such a core part of the community since
before we launched it. Tara mentioned, and I'll leave
it with Tara to, to kind of talk about it in the in the chats on
there. But Tara mentioned she's now got
an e-mail she can send or an e-mail address.
She can send an e-mail to you saying discount this brand and
on my site by 10% and it goes to ChatGPT and it goes through to a
Shopify store and everything starts discounting, which is
absolutely incredible. And it's just amazing seeing
these use cases of how people are using AI and, and starting
to bring it together. I think it's still, it's
certainly not going to replace William Shakespeare in the near
future, but it is starting to do certainly those like Domino
effect where you're like, I just want to tell it one thing and
have it do all of this or here's tons of data.
Tell me based on all this data, tell me what product I should
put in my homepage banner right now.
What's the best selling product based on my inventory levels,
current sales trajectory, stock that's coming in.
And it can do that in real time. It can do it very quickly.
And then you can go and check it yourself.
And it's easier to go and check what it's come up with and find
the find the answer yourselves, which I think is amazing.
Last question then Paul. So we're going to finish on
this. Just having a quick glance at
the time, what are some exciting new features and launches that
we should keep an eye out specifically from Rebel Cheese
coming up in the in the near future?
Oh. So I would say one thing is
hopefully if things go well, we would like to open a.
So we consider Austin, TX our home, our main distribution
center. We make all the products here.
We're fulfilling and shipping from here.
Again, like I said, we own the entire vertical stack, but we do
realize that to get broad reach across the US for customer
experience and controlling costs, we have plans to open a
second distribution center on the East Coast of the US,
hopefully second-half of this year.
And then if that goes well, maybe in 26, open another
distribution center along the West Coast.
And the plan for that would be by having the three distribution
centers, Austin, what East Coast and West Coast, it'll allow us
to do ground delivery within one day, which will really
dramatically just decrease the cost of shipping And all those
materials that I talked about earlier.
And we were shipping to Canada as a test because we got a lot
of emails from customers in Canada about the lack of good
quality plant based cheese products worked really well and
we had temporarily paused them because of the tariffs.
We would like to turn it back on and they they've been a very,
very loyal set of customers. And with that in just a little
bit, I'm going to be talking for to a representative from Mexico.
And he has about 25 grocery stores that he said Mexico is
also very plant based, very vegetarian culture and would
really, really love to have our products in.
And he's help, he's going, he's willing to help us get into
Mexico. And lastly, if all goes well
with our distribution plan, we would love to be in the UK.
Our one of our Co founders Kirsten is we would love that
too. Oh, is she brilliant.
Love that. Absolutely.
We're a tiny island. But yeah, we'd love to have
Rebel Cheese here. Definitely.
We've been sending some. Test packages and they make it
safely across the pond. So we would love to be able to
open up and distribute to the UK first.
And then we have some very loyal German and Swiss.
Swiss is very surprising, but very, very loyal.
Swiss Swiss cheese. Is a really big thing, really
big thing here in Europe yeah, yeah.
And I guess the. Last thing is we have been
working really hard to get everything kosher and hopefully
in the next week or two we'll have our kosher certification,
which for those of you that are not in food CPG brands, the
kosher community is, is very, very, very loyal to their
products because they look for those symbols that define that.
The brand has gone through very strict, very regimented analysis
to determine that all the ingredients that go into your
brand are also kosher. So that's one thing, the loyalty
of the kosher community, those who practice the kosher
lifestyle. The other thing that I learned
in having to do this myself was that people who live in kosher
neighborhoods. That they themselves are not
kosher, have grown up thinking and believing that the kosher
symbol is a sign of good health because of those strict
regimented process to get your product kosher.
So it actually is served as a health indicator for a lot of
brands because of that rigorous testing.
And so that's going to really help unlock a lot of the
communities along the East Coast of the US and Houston.
So that we're very excited about that.
I think there was a. Similar thing actually with and
it's quite amusing looking back now, but it was fair trade and I
remember someone when it kind of clocks.
I used to think that, oh, fair trade must be really healthy
because it's fairly traded less pesticides and other stuff.
And then it really came to a head when someone said, you
know, Cadbury's chocolate, that's that's fair trade.
It must be healthy. I was like, it can't be it's
chocolate cannot be healthy. Like, I mean it, maybe it could
have this day and age, but certainly five years ago, it's
like it can't be another sense of it's fairly traded, not
healthy food, but I think kosher absolutely is because it's
probably very similar to what I've forgotten the name of the
diet now, the sugar free diet that a lot of people do.
I can't remember now. I mean, it's like carb free,
sugar free keto, keto diet, that's it.
So there's things like the keto diet where naturally it's you're
cutting out things that we know are bad for our bodies, which is
really exciting. But I mean, it's such an amazing
journey you guys are on. I say this is some I guess we're
going to try and get you back in a year if you're around, Paul, I
appreciate your Diaries getting more and more busy as time goes
on, but we'll try and get you back in a year and see if you've
opened this distribution centres.
Plenty of brands we've worked over the years have done that.
One in particular up in Washington state, they opened up
on the, they were going to go East Coast.
They did it in Texas instead. And now the delivery costs have
been just dramatically dropped. I always imagine the US is in a
massive V, isn't it? It's kind of like you've got the
coast down as Texas back up the other coast.
So no one wants to live in the desert.
Well, some people do in the middle in the Midwest.
But Paul, I mean, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate you. Obviously, very, very busy
individual, amazing career so far.
And it feels like it's only just getting started in the shop fire
world. So thank you so much for your
time and thanks for all the insights you shared with us
today. Well, thank you so much.
Nick, this has been amazing and yeah, definitely love to come
back in a year and that's going to put a light of fire under our
butts to make sure. Yeah, we're going to have to
open the. Distribution center I'm going to
be really disappointed now otherwise now I hope it all goes
really, really well. And so yeah, if everyone tuning
in at home, if you want to reach out to Paul and Paul, what is
what's the website? How can people find out about
Rebel Cheese? So so.
We are rebelcheese.com, so Rebel Cheese oneword.com, easy URL and
my e-mail is paul@rebelcheese.com.
You can reach me via e-mail. You can search for me on
LinkedIn. I'm happy to answer any
questions. I can tell you things, my
mistakes. I don't know if I've had this
done, but I can definitely tell you the mistakes I've made, so I
love that. Well, you've.
Definitely done something really well to help bring the company
to where it's today. So, yeah, appreciate your time
And so, and definitely reach out to Paul if you do have any
questions, especially about any of the apps we've mentioned
today. And I think one thing that's
really powerful as well that, that that's probably worth
asking, asking you, Paul from, from anyone is if you're
thinking of using any of the apps or the tools that we've
spoken about today. Paul isn't doesn't strike me as
someone who's just kind of added it and left it alone.
You know, Paul's the CTO, so he's had to test the tech, make
it integrate, probably found some holes and bugs.
And as you say, nobody made some mistakes which have led to using
it better in the in the in the and end result anyway.
So I'm definitely utilize that. Guys, if you haven't already, I
mentioned the start, please hit the subscribe button, leave us a
review on whatever platform you're listening to this on.
Check out the growth hub as well.
And you come and chat some amazing brands that we've got in
there as well. And we hope you can join us
again next week. Thank you for tuning in.